This invention relates generally to online advertising and in particular to providing advertisements to users of online system using multiple bids associated with different targeting criteria.
Some advertising systems use a bid-based model in which advertisers bid against each other to advertise to groups of users. These advertising systems typically allow an advertiser to provide a single bid with an advertisement, which also has associated targeting criteria. This limits the advertiser's ability to target the advertisement differently to different groups of users. For example, if an advertiser of an advertisement assigned a bid to users who like basketball and/or football, the advertisement would not be targeted equally to users who like basketball only, football only, or both football and basketball. But an advertiser may value these groups of users differently. To target to these groups differently, the advertiser would have to create three separate ad campaigns with different bid amounts to advertise to users who like basketball, users who like football, and users who like both basketball and football. As such, there is a need for an advertising system that enables advertisers to associate multiple targeting criteria bids with an advertisement.